Top 40 Michael Scheuer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If the Americans attack Iran for the first time in 1,400 years, we may unite Sunnis and Shias against us. So I guess there is room for accomplishment everywhere.”

— Michael Scheuer

2. “We haven’t done anything. That has devolved into a partisan bickering of the kind that says Nero was fiddling while Rome burned.”

— Michael Scheuer

3. “Our relationship with Israel is another reason we’re being attacked. But an American politician – whether Muslim or not – who criticizes Israel as a martyrdom operation in American politics cannot survive as an official or as a politician.”

— Michael Scheuer

4. “I think it’s very instructive to look at a man like Ramsey Ahmad Yousef, who almost brought down the World Trade Center in 1993. He’s short some fingers, his body is scarred, he’s missing an eye – because he was practicing and not getting it right. But eventually they get it right.”

— Michael Scheuer

5. “If you look at groups in the Palestine region, Hamas and the Palestine Islamic jihad, more often than not in their first operations they would accidentally blow themselves up on the way to the target or the bomb wouldn’t go off.”

— Michael Scheuer

6. “I also think that there is a huge failure in the American education system to educate Americans about where we, our system, our government, came from. And to some extent this failure is shared in places like Britain and Canada and Australia.”

— Michael Scheuer

7. “One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community, and especially the counterterrorism community, is to assume if someone hasn’t attacked us, it’s because he can’t or because we’ve defeated him.”

— Michael Scheuer

8. “The Western world doesn’t really give enough credit to the importance in history of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. For us it was a sideshow of the Cold War. For the Islamic world it was an unprovoked infidel invasion of a Muslim country not unlike Iraq.”

— Michael Scheuer

9. “Every mujahadeen who comes in from outside the country finds an environment where Arabic is spoken. So in that sense, it’s a tremendous come-on for the young in Islam. But I think much more important is, it just validates so much of what the Muslim world is predisposed to believe.”

— Michael Scheuer

10. “One of the reasons they didn’t go to Bosnia, bin Laden has explained extensively, was because they couldn’t establish a base anywhere. Not in Catholic Croatia. Not in Orthodox Serbia. So they sent some trainers and a lot of money.”

— Michael Scheuer

11. “No one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. I don’t believe in inevitability. But I think it’s pretty close to being inevitable.”

— Michael Scheuer

12. “And so to dismiss these homegrown terrorists as boobs, which is one of the terms that was used in one of the New York newspapers after the Miami raid, is true now, but to bet on that is I think a sure way to lose your bank account.”

— Michael Scheuer

13. “Sister Virginia used to say, ‘You’ll be known by the company you keep.’”

— Michael Scheuer

14. “What we face is a scared populace, and because it’s scared, it’s willing to put up with what I think are inevitably more moves toward the constriction of civil liberties, mobility within the country, the ability to travel overseas, all of those things we have long taken for granted.”

— Michael Scheuer

15. “It’s not a choice between war and peace. It’s a choice between war and endless war. It’s not appeasement. I think it’s better even to call it American self-interest.”

— Michael Scheuer

16. “You couldn’t have done this without killing an Arab prince.”

— Michael Scheuer

17. “Well, there are certain pockets of improvement. The one that I think is most important is that state and local law enforcement levels have started to do a lot more educative efforts within their organizations to understand the kind of threat we’re facing. They’ve given up on the federal level.”

— Michael Scheuer

18. “What I tried to do is to present the evidence that’s available and that no one has been able to refute. Not even the Arab governments who own their media have been able to denigrate bin Laden as a man.”

— Michael Scheuer

19. “In an odd way, we have really destroyed two of our strongest allies against the Islamists. Saddam Hussein, and we’ve probably fatally undermined Bashir al Assad in Syria.”

— Michael Scheuer

20. “Major danger lie for America? That we could very well be defeated oversees and at home. And the source of it is clearly that we have yet to find a politician in either partywho’s willing to tell the American people the truth.”

— Michael Scheuer

21. “I don’t know what our capabilities are. If I were there, I think it would be nutty to do that. The only country on Earth more containable than Iran is Iraq. And we’ve certainly made a mistake there. We could have continued Saddam.”

— Michael Scheuer

22. “Until we respect bin Laden, we are going to die in numbers that are probably unnecessary.”

— Michael Scheuer

23. “Initial incompetence is not a reason to be dismissive of capabilities. Al Qaeda itself was incompetent when it started as a terrorist organization. And clearly it’s gone from blowing themselves up to knocking down the World Trade Center.”

— Michael Scheuer

24. “The second touchstone for America I think unquestionably was pushing to conclusion the program we had with the Russians to control the Soviet nuclear arsenal. I tend to think that more than anything else, that will come back to haunt us.”

— Michael Scheuer

25. “We’ve gone thorough religious wars and civil wars. America has gone through slavery, we’ve all gone through two world wars, segregation. Ultimately it’s been a bloody, trying, wasteful, but eventually positive struggle.”

— Michael Scheuer

26. “Most dramatically, and perhaps least noticed, is the violence inside Saudi Arabia itself.”

— Michael Scheuer

27. “There is no way to avoid the reality that the American government in the past years has been the most spectacularly hypocrisy-driven government in the world. We rival the Soviet Union in some stages, in some ways, in hypocrisy.”

— Michael Scheuer

28. “A nuclear weapon of some dimension, whether it’s actually a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb, or some kind of radiological device. Yes, I think it’s probably a near thing.”

— Michael Scheuer

29. “No one wants to abandon the Israelis. But I think the perception is, and I think it’s probably an accurate perception, that the tail is leading the dog – that we are giving the Israelis carte blanche ability to exercise whatever they want to do in their area.”

— Michael Scheuer

30. “I’ve said before: If Osama bin Laden was a Christian, Iraq was the Christmas present he always wanted but never expected his parents to give. It validated for the Muslim world virtually all of bin Laden’s rhetoric. He had always said the Americans will destroy any strong Muslim regime, and we did.”

— Michael Scheuer

31. “The major problem for America is we’re losing two wars. We’re losing in Afghanistan, we’re losing in Iraq. And there seems very little likelihood that we’re going to increase the number of troops we have in either place to the point that we can prevail.”

— Michael Scheuer

32. “We’re being attacked, Britain is being attacked, our allies are being attacked because we’ve installed and backed and implemented a set of policies in the Middle East for the last years or more.”

— Michael Scheuer

33. “When you cut down to the micro-level in the West, I think we have a great deal to be worried about. And it’s odd because the American leadership, again in both parties, tends to take comfort in the idea that bin Laden is just an inspirational symbol now.”

— Michael Scheuer

34. “The FBI continues to be a broken, anachronistic organization, but state and local law enforcement officials are much more attuned to the kind of threat we’re facing. I think that’s very hopeful, but it’s a long-term process.”

— Michael Scheuer

35. “So in a sense, that little war in the Levant had a horrendous effect in terms of the stability of countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, over the long term. Because once again, it proved to Muslims that their governments couldn’t protect them and would side with the enemy.”

— Michael Scheuer

36. “I think one of the most destructive things in terms of American security has been for all of our leaders, without exception in both parties, to identify Osama bin Laden as a gangster or as a madman, as an apocalyptic character who’s out to destroy our civilization.”

— Michael Scheuer

37. “And we’re being attacked because of what we do, not because of who we are. And by refusing to talk about that, I’m afraid the American people, at least, don’t have a good idea of just how dangerous the threat is that we face.”

— Michael Scheuer

38. “I think we’ll see it mostly in the United States. We’re getting to the point where al Qaeda is ready to again attack us inside America. I think we’re basically defenseless.”

— Michael Scheuer

39. “I think Mr. Clarke had a tendency to interfere too much with the activities of the CIA, and our leadership at the senior level let him interfere too much. So criticism from him I kind of wear as a badge of honor.”

— Michael Scheuer

40. “The war in Iraq – if Osama was a Christian – it’s the Christmas present he never would have expected.”

— Michael Scheuer

41. “I know these days it sounds a little odd, but American governments are very fearful of European reaction. They were afraid we would be considered gunslingers.”

— Michael Scheuer

42. “Our leaders continue to say that we’re making strong headway against this problem. And I think we are not.”

— Michael Scheuer

43. “One of the problems of not allowing the American people to read what bin Laden has said is that in October 2001 just after the war began in Afghanistan, he gave a speech that had two parts to it.”

— Michael Scheuer

44. “Bin Laden does reprehensible activities, and we should surely take care of that by killing him as soon as we can. But he’s not an irrational man. He’s a very worthy enemy. He’s an enemy to worry about.”

— Michael Scheuer